Post Your Comment

76 Comments

Since SSDs have a hook in me, I no longer put any consideration into performance of high-capacity drives. The only things I'm looking for in them are low power, low heat, and low noise. For the most part they spend their time idle and any time I need them it's to access items that have no need for high throughput (e.g., media and backup). But... that's just me and I'm just a single person.Reply

I don't think that's just you. I think that's really the usage paradigm we are seeing the whole industry move towards. SSDs for the OS and a few apps, HUGE efficient low power drives for all your other stuff. Given this I'm not sure it was a smart move for Seagate to abandon their 5900s. I can tell you the next few drives I'm going to be buying will almost certainly be more WD 2TB Greens, if the prices ever go back down again.Reply

Great article Anand. Glad to see AT reviewing internal HDD's again (it seems to have been forever as the modern focus is obviously on SSD's)

Statistically, the ideal operating temperature for HDD's is between 35-45c, and while Green drives operate <=35c, they still seem to be more reliable in the end; I've never had one fail, where as I've had two 7200.11 drives and a WD 1TB Black fail in the last two-three years, all from SMART sector allocation errors.

I think Seagate is making a mistake giving an entire market to WD. I don't think Hitachi or Samsung make 'green drives' (they might, I'm just not familiar with them) so WD is going to have this market cornered, and I believe thats a big market, especially for external drives where the low temperatures and power especially make sense.Reply

I agree so much, I moved all of my high-capacity storage drives to a separate, dedicated computer.

There's just something very... freeing... about having an appliance-like network storage. It backs up all of my computers (and itself) at night. I don't have to think about what movies and pictures are on which machine.

I've gone with an 8 bay external eSata case. I love the hell out of it, so I'm using my HTPC as a file server now, but the drives aren't clogging up the case and have their own power. I thought about going NAS, but I wanted the high speed Sata connection for my game pc. Even still, interface aside, big low power drives still make more sense to me. Using my HTPC in this way seems to be the best and most efficient, but if a NAS ever seems to make more sense, I'll just grab an ITX mb and case and build a small PC to connect to the 8 Bay instead...Reply

The 2TB version looks like a price sweet spot. My only concern with these new drives is their 2 year warranty, which doesn't even match Western Digital's 3 years on the Green drives, let alone 5 years on the Black drives. Still, time will tell, should see first reliability reports in a few months.Reply

Personally, I want reliability, reliability, reliability. Performance is pretty much irrelevant these days just by sticking in a single SSD for your OS and apps. However, I feel that drive quality has dropped significantly ever since we went over 1TB a few years ago and now I'm always on the lookout for when the next drive is about to fail. This is across Seagate, WD and Hitachi, including WD's Black line.

I've had the most success with Samsung in the past 2 years or so, but now that they have sold their HD division to Seagate, I don't know who I can trust. I hope that now that Seagate and WD are the only 2 makers left, that they will bring up their standards, but I'm not holding my breath.Reply

Agreed (times 3). Some of these 4+ platter HDDs have absurdly high failure rates! Totally unacceptable. I wonder if reliability is one of the reasons for reducing the platter count on these larger drives by using 1 GB platters. If that's the case, I'm all for it.

SSD for speed. HDD for file storage and backup - and it had better be reliable because we know it won't be fast.Reply

Don't bet on reliability from a lower end product. History tells us that older technology is not worked on to make it more reliable, only cheaper and those so called GREEN drives are targeted at the low cost customer who in the minds of the marketing geniuses deserve to have something that breaks early and breaks often.

Super high-end performance may not have the maturity to be reliable but lower performance products are usually even worst. Reliability is found in the "enterprise class" which usually performs on the level of upper-mid-range to middle-high end. There is a reason for that, these parts are not prototypes anymore and they are not made of components rejected for manufacturing better products.

I agree regarding Samsung drives.Anecdotes are not data and all that, but Samsung is the one drive brand I've not had fail. I'm not talking about sample sizes of 2 or 3 -- I have 9 of just their 2TB F4 in my home server right now. I've worked with and owned over 400 hard drives.I think I know my hard drives. I've set up six large storage servers; 2 for enterprise. I was the first moderator on StorageReview's forums, edited Eugene Ra's articles before publication, made friends with three hard drive engineers through many discussions. One of the other more prevalent users of that site owned Red Hill Computers in Australia. Since starting that company in the early 90's, only one Samsung drive was ever returned to him as defective, and that one had visible dents and was from a customer that wanted a refund and not a replacement. He suspected the customer damaged the drive intentionally to get some quick cash. Whether true or not, one return in several decades is notable.

I wouldn't touch Samsung's phones or televisions, but their hard drives are rock solid.Reply

Cause the terrible mess that the HD market is in due to to the Thai flooding has even the old Barracuda Green 2TB selling for north of $220 on NewEgg right now!! And even at the low end I haven't seen it much lower than about $170-180. I can remember selling these drives for $70 or less only a few months ago when I was working computer retail.Reply

You're right. The fact that the company making 75% of all hard drive motors for the entire industry is currently unable to produce anything is no excuse for prices skyrocketing. The fact that every computer manufacturer has purchased as much stock as they can to ensure they can still sell PCs is no excuse for prices skyrocketing. The fact that even once the flood waters fully recede, it will take 6-8 months for everything to come back online 100% is no excuse for prices skyrocketing. The fact that once we're back at 100% production, early drive production runs may be questionable due to downtime, inconsistent machine performance, etc is no excuse for prices skyrocketing.

Seriously? I am so tired of seeing people say that the price jump is gouging. The limited supply of drives that retailers have are being sold at these prices, because those who absolutely need the storage are willing to pay it. I am willing to bet that unless a miracle happens, you won't be able to buy mechanical drives at all from most retailers for awhile next year. The limited amount of production that does exist will be snapped up by the PC makers to keep them afloat.Reply

And yet, how foolish is it of any company (or companies), to depend on getting 75% of ANY part required for their product, solely from one area of the world, which is known for having a monsoon season (and subsequent flooding)??

While this year's flooding in Thailand is much worse than previous years have seen (the "hundred year flood" concept), it's still awfully foolish of these companies not to have spread their suppliers around. I'm sure there are factories in India and China that would have happily taken on part of the load in the past, thus negating this shortage, and minimizing it's impact.

In the meantime, as has been pointed out already, this might be a foolish decision, by Seagate, to trade cost for performance. Again, as already stated, reliability is much more important of a consideration, and I'd rather be stuck with a 5900rpm drive with a 3 to 5 year warranty, than a 7200 rpm drive with a 2 year warranty, especially if it's just going to be a storage drive.

This is normal for any aging technology. These motors are not used in anything else. The market for these motors is not expected to increase, ever, and will almost certainly decrease in the not too distant future. Nobody is going to start up a company to make hard drive motors, therefore there is only one major supplier and a handful of smaller suppliers that could not produce enough on their own. It will become more and more a niche market, just like cathode-ray tube suppliers. It's not that there won't be demand for some time to come, but rather that the demand will never again grow. There is no more room for growth in the hard drive market in general, so not much incentive for new suppliers, or for current suppliers to expand.Reply

I think you meant to say, more than a 2x increase in price - which translates to a 100%+ increase in price.

That said, the hard drive industry is a hard-pressed commodity industry (you can blame the OEMs for the drive the price into the ground nonsense...) that has been looking for an excuse to shake up historical tpricing rends. I agree with most that these supply/demand price drivers are actually gouging but the on the flip-side, storage has been almost TOO crazy cheap for far too long. Just think how much tech (layers) go into storage, how much realibility is expected to perserve data & deliver performance and then compare that to how much you pay for an iPod, iPwn or HDMI cable and ask yourself - what gives?Reply

That said, the hard drive industry is a hard-pressed commodity industry (you can blame the OEMs for the drive the price into the ground nonsense...) that has been looking for an excuse to shake up historical pricing trends. I agree with most that these supply/demand price drivers are actually gouging but the on the flip-side, storage has been almost TOO crazy cheap for far too long. Just think how much tech (layers) goes into storage, how much reliability is expected to perserve data & deliver performance and then compare that to how much you pay for an iPod, iPwn, HDMI cable or even your monthly phone bill and ask yourself - what gives? Reply

The price has been multiplied by two, but you can't parse that into "more than a 2x increase in price" due to reading conventions. It will be read as "more than a two times increase in price," which taken literally means the same thing as a "200% increase." They both literally say "the price has been increased, by 200 percent" and "the price has been increased more than two times."

If a bottle costs, say, fifty dollars and the price undergoes a 200 percent price increase, the increase is 200 percent of the original cost. You then add the increase--the 200 percent of the original value-to the original cost. The original cost and the increase are separate numbers. Much simpler to say that the price has more than doubled, or it's now twice the previous cost.Reply

If people are buying at price levels increased by 200% - they are surely being gouged and making hasty purchasing decisions. Not saying there aren't channels pricing hard drives at that level, just saying that 2x (100% increase) is the typical trend.Reply

I agree with what he's saying, although his wording could be better.I, too, hate when people say something is 3x "faster" when it is really only 3x "as fast", which, of course, is only "2x faster".Reply

I always thought Low Power were selling really well. At least that is what's happening on WD's side.

And i am waiting for an 3,5" HDD that could be plugged into USB2.0 without addtional power supply. I dont mind being much slower ( USB 2.0 is only up to 38MB/s anyway ), I need something to backup and write slowly. Reply

Hi Anand, is the effective sequential write power consumption (for example) of the XT comparitively better than the graphs indicate? I ask because of the higher number of MB the XT should write per second, in comparison to the Green, at its measured power consumption.

That is to say, the XT should be finished before the Green and the XT's power consumption should then be able to drop. An intersting power consumption metric might be Joules/MB written or read :)

Also, you would need three Greens spinning (at 2TB) v two XTs (at 3TB) to make up 6TB of storage. For someone with a larger storage needs this might be relevant. Again with metrics, I would be interested to see watts/TB at idle.

I couldn't care less when Seagate releases their new 'drives'. I don't know how others are able to use that garbage, but each time I stumble upon recent Seagates (post 7200.10) they are either dead or dying as we speak, reallocating sectors etc. It's a miracle these products even make it to market since their reliabily is non-existant.

Flaky and unreliable and now with only 2 year warranty! And the 2 400 power on hours limit is ridiculous. It's even worse than IBM Deskstars being rated for only 8 hours a day.

Keep your drives, Seagate. Not interested. I'd rather wait for WD to rebuild it's factories rather than deal with you.Reply

Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of 0.32% - Is based on a usage of 2400 power-on-hours a year.

If you use it more, then the chance of a failure increases over that estimate of .3So use a drive for a year 24hours a day 8736hrs, would mean your MTTF is just over 1%. The longer you keep a drive the sooner it will die anyway.

As for reliability, well, I "Expect" any drive to fail at some point, and I always have a spare which is a clone of the one I'm using. Anything else is just asking for trouble.Seagate drives are not any worse than other makes.

Warranty - if my drive fails within "5" years - I still contact them and ask for a replacement, as its well within my consumer rights here in the UK (reasonable length of time and all that)

But every one has a favorite supplier, just make sure you have a backup/clone or cloud to keep you stuff safe. :)Reply

The laptop oriented Momentus XT did so well in reviews I wonder why HDD manufacturers haven't imitated it. Even on desktops where you can have a dedicated SSD, a hybrid would do better in picking which files you access most, and do it automatically. Reply

"The laptop oriented Momentus XT did so well in reviews I wonder why HDD manufacturers haven't imitated it."

Because it sucked in real life, as opposed to artificial tests. The algorithms it uses to decide what to store in the flash are garbage, so any sustained long reads from the drive (eg backups, playing music, playing a movie) remove all the useful stuff (OS files, apps) from the flash.

And since Seagate pissed in that well, giving hybrids a bad name, no-one else wants to take the risk that their drive won't sell because people aren't willing to gamble 50%+ extra dollars on the CHANCE that it might perform better.

Of course, the other thing this shows us is the fundamental stupidity of this industry. If they were willing to work on creating a set of benchmarks that accurately reflected real world usage (eg heavily weighted the cost of small delays for VM swapping and launching apps, took into account the extent to which data is ejected from the flash in a hybrid, etc) and could then point to those benchmarks as proving the value of their hybrids, people would be happy to pay the premium. But no, no-one wants a benchmark that shows the actual VALUE of their drives (as opposed to just tech specs) because they're all afraid they'll look bad --- better to be king of a dying industry than risk falling behind in a new industry.Reply

In this day and age of SSDs, is the speed of massive drives really important anymore? Consumers are more likely to either go with a smaller cheaper drive as their primary, or an SSD. Big drives like these tend to be used for bulk storage, where performance often isn't very relevant. This makes the Green drives, in my opinion, even more important.

The few watts of power might not seem like much, but when you've got 10 of them in a home file server, that saving adds up. Between the Barracuda 3TB and the Caviar Green 3TB, there's almost 3W at idle. So, 30W there. The startup power draw on the Green drives (how much power they take to spin up) is also much lower, which can make a big difference in sizing a power supply for a home file server. And of course, noise becomes a big concern too when you've got 10 drives...Reply

start up power... oh my. you realize that unless you use an Atom CPU, the power draw of 10 5400rpm HDs vs 10 7200rpm HDs will be ridiculously marginal at least at start up... I can't argue with runing 10 drives all day not making a difference but then, you should not rely on low end products for such a task since they just won't survive 24/7 activity.

also, these drives need to disappear completely because as long as they exist, some cheap ass OEM will use them as a boot drive on some all in one that is reviewed today on this very same website. And that my friend, is a crime against the consumer.Reply

There is a segment that Seagate isn't considering as it decides to axe the Green line: the home server market. If you're doing mass archival to some external storage, random performance is likely not a big concern. Instead, all you want is cheap, low-power storage.

Is this a legitimate viewpoint?Surely, for most home servers, the drive is not in use. So the OS can spin it down. If it's only spinning for an hour or less a day, then does the higher power it's using while spinning matter that much?Reply

"The new 1TB platter drives all carry the M001 suffix to their model numbers."

B.S. Look at the chart. Clearly only the 1TB and 3TB models are using the 1TB platters given their listed heads/disks (6/3 on 3TB, 2/1 on 1TB). The 1.5TB appears to be using the slightly older 750GB platters (4 heads/2 disks) and the 2TB using even older 667GB platters (6 heads/3 disks).Reply

From this review one can conclude the WD Caviar Green gives the best performance per Watt.

A few years ago I build an AMD 780G based HTPC that has 6 SATA and 3 USB WD Caviar Green drives. Both 1 and 2 TB units. Zero problems so far: everything runs very cool and quiet. 1080p playback no problem either.

Is Seagate using 4k sectors with their 1TB platters? Where I work, 512B vs 4KB sector size on drives makes a big difference in whether or not some machines will factory restore properly. Western Digital has been labeling *most*, but not all, of their Advanced Format drives, but Seagate is a big unknown.Reply

Main reason I went with WD instead of Seagate - reliability. WD drives up to 1TB have been rock solid for me. 2TB Greens are kinda flaky though, that's why I chose Samsung HD204UIs for 2TB Green drives, they are quite good.

Now that Samsung is out of business and WD had sunken, seems like it's a win-win for Seagate, right? Not quite so. Seagate sucks so much noone in their right mind would even consider it. For instance, they release firmware updates for their bricks on a regular basis. Haven't seen a single update for a WD drive - ever.Reply

I'm not sure where all of these comments about Seagate reliability are coming from. I suspect we're hearing from people who have used a few of them or have encountered a problem or two over time.

I've installed thousands of Seagate drives over the years (starting with the 40GB models) and have had only a handful of returns for failure (less than 5). In two of these failures, heat was to blame due to air circulation problems.

Some of the 7200.11 drives were a bit of a fiasco and required firmware updates to work properly but those issues seemed to be under only specific and rare circumstances.

My experience with Seagate has been that their drives perform well and, more importantly, have been absolutely rock solid.

I tend to not bother posting in comments sections but thought I would counter some of the disinformation with real-world experience.

Now, if I could just actually get some more drives on a timely basis but that's a different problem. :)Reply

"I've installed thousands of Seagate drives over the years (starting with the 40GB models) and have had only a handful of returns for failure (less than 5)."

You're kidding, right?

"Some of the 7200.11 drives were a bit of a fiasco and required firmware updates to work properly but those issues seemed to be under only specific and rare circumstances."

ALL of Seagate drives post 7200.10 are unreliable due to design change. 40GB 7200.7 and other drives of that era were rock solid, true. But they also had issues like oxydizing contacts IIRC.

Basically what Seagate did with 7200.11 and derivatives - they took a more advanced SCSI hard drive architecture and implemented it with low-grade consumer components. SCSI drives enjoy much higher quality heads, lower density platters to minimize read/write errors whereas consumer drives have very high read/write error rate and poor signal quality. SCSI architecture is a lot more demanding to the quality of drive components which Seagate also lowered to cut costs. So what do we have now?

Seagate drives are bricking left and right, coz that's what server drives do when they encounter errors to allow for data restoration. Seagate is working very closely with data recovery companies. In fact, their drives are designed to not only simplify recovery process, but to also ensure continuing supply of bricked drives. Seagate doesn't care if your drive bricks. After that you're supposed to pay the recovery company if the data is precious enough.

On the contrary, recovery companies don't like WD drives. They are made differently, therefore in most cases data recovery is not possible since every drive is basically unique so you can't use head assemblies from other drives or PCBs etc.

WD drives up to 1TB have been and are very reliable unlike Seagates. Post 1TB WD is also having difficulties but they are still far better than anything Seagate these days. A lot of people have encountered dead 2TB WD Greens, for instance.Reply

I'm just not seeing the same thing you are. I've put a ton of 7200.12 drives in the field and have had one failure. 7200.11 also with one failure but, realistically, I used very few of them because they were replaced with the 7200.12'sfairly quickly by Seagate. I'm sure there was a reason for that.

Yes, by the way, I am indeed serious about having used thousands of Seagate drives and experienced almost no failures.

However, even in the thousands, I suspect the number is statistically not significant enough to be of great use.

It is, though, somewhat better than "I had two seagate drives and both gave me problems. Seagate sucks and all their drives fail"

I think one thing everyone can agree on is that the Maxtor drives of the 40GB and 80GB era must have had a horrible failure rate :)Reply

"Yes, by the way, I am indeed serious about having used thousands of Seagate drives and experienced almost no failures."

Excuse me, but how could you have used thousands of drives? It's physically impossible. You could've installed them and shipped those many PCs to consumers, but in actuality there'd be no way for you to observe them.

Modern Seagate drives are the worst, and it's not just my personal experience - it's a fact. Seagate took a wrong turn redesigning their consumer drives from the ground up. Now I hear rumors they've been investing heavily into the new architecture so maybe future drives won't suck as much, but that's yet to be seen.

To sum it up, 7200.11s had bricking issues. But not only that. I personally have used several 7200.11 drives and did observe instability. For instance, some of them would show increasing High Fly Writes count IIRC, and then one day would just start clicking and the PCs would freeze. But they wouldn't die surprisingly, however those aren't the drives I can trust obviously.

Newer 7200.12 generation drives tend to quickly develop reallocated sectors. I mean like all of them and it speaks for itself. Don't know if they brick just as often as 7200.11, but I'm not willing to try.

No such problems with any WD, Samsung or Hitachi drives. Now that the latter two have quit the market, I just don't see Seagate being a viable option.Reply

"Some of the 7200.11 drives were a bit of a fiasco and required firmware updates to work properly but those issues seemed to be under only specific and rare circumstances."

Sure, if you consider power-cycling a computer a rare circumstance. The issues with the 7200.11 drives are well documented and it wasn't just 'some' by any small margin. Please don't try to rewrite history.

I personally had 10 out of 20 new drives fail within 2 weeks because of the issue. I'm sure the other 10 would had failed had I not updated the firmware after researching the problem. And Seagate's handling of the issue with denial after denial was idiotic. Haven't bought a drive since.

Since then, even after the update, I've had to RMA 5 of those 20 drives back to Seagate. One of the 'certified refurbished' drives I got back as replacement failed within a week. Haven't bought a Seagate drive since.Reply

There's really not much point in going back and forth on this any further. I have a large number of drives in active service and I do not see the issues you are referring to.

The 7200.11 family was largely skipped over and I am perfectly willing to agree that it may have been problematic. As I said earlier, there is likely a reason they replaced that family so quickly. I used few of them. 7200.12 I have found to be rock solid.

Everyone has their preferences and we're not going to convince each other to change so I think we can agree to disagree.

By the way, it is possible that I will start to see abnormal issues or failures with the 7200.12 series but I'm simply saying that I have not to this point.Reply

I wonder if the target audience is people that use an SSD as their primary drive but want a moderately fast second data drive. Something they can use for: storing infrequently used files, a scratch disk, Internet browser temp files, Microsoft's virtual memory, and other activities that write a lot of tiny temporary files that will decrease the life of an SSD.

They want a middle of the road drive that will be reliable and fast but they don't need a 10,000RPM drive that will die in a year and uses as much energy as a small hamlet or a 5,400RPM Eco drive that takes forever to transfer data back and forth.Reply